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Embracing Obsolescence
Happy 5th Birthday OS X from a Jaguar User
- 2006.03.24
Ah, Mac OS X. Can you believe five years have already gone by since 10.0 was released, and not only is Apple still in business, but this newfangled Mac OS continues to flourish. The transition from the NeXT purchase - from the subsequent integration of personnel and technologies to actually rolling out a new Mac OS - took a wee bit of time and effort.
Rhapsody and its multicolored boxes became OS X with Cocoa and Carbon applications and its very noticeable Classic compatibility layer.
Now we swing forward yet again to Mac OS X on Intel processors with a transparent PowerPC compatibility layer. Classic is not supported on Intel CPUs, but OS X is still OS X, even on those fancy new Intel processors.
I was not an early adopter of OS X. From the start of the Public Beta, I was intrigued by the promise of a more robust operating system with its improved multitasking and increased stability, but the first few editions of OS X felt unfinished. The promise was there, but the OS X Public Beta, 10.0, and 10.1 were all a little rough around the edges.
Jaguar Rocks
However, Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar", which sprang to life in 2002, proved to be a marked improvement of functionality and polish. Indeed, many pundits and users feel the Jaguar release was the first truly usable version of OS X.
As I remember things, Jaguar was the first release to use the cat names as a public identifier. While 10.3 "Panther" and 10.4 "Tiger" have followed and continued to improve by adding new features, I've never taken my personal Macs past Jaguar - [partly because I am a cheapskate, this site is Low End Mac after all, but also because I feel Jaguar is a very solid operating system.]
During my transition in 2003, my Macs of choice
were a Snow iMac DV SE and a
Graphite FireWire iBook SE.
Both were fine computers and genuinely stable for using the classic
Mac OS. Thankfully, Jaguar was even more stable, flexible, and
robust enough to handle the tasks I threw at my G3-powered Macs.
Those tasks were nothing terribly fancy - word processing, email,
web browsing, chat, music playback, and some design work.
Everything more or less worked similarly enough to the old Mac OS
that I never felt lost as I figured my way around this new OS.
Overall, my first impressions were favorable, and I did not feel this new Mac OS was terribly different from the classic versions. Sure my iMac's 256 MB of RAM went from more than adequate to a bare minimum for respectable performance, but the 576 MB RAM in my iBook made things generally comfortable.
Between the fancy Quartz display technology and the under-the-hood changes, overall snappiness was not as immediate as the classic Mac OS. Of course, once the multitasking began, I could appreciate how the Mac OS X interface stayed responsive, unlike Mac OS 9 and earlier. Barring the occasional spinning beach ball or kernel panic - thankfully rare - I was overwhelmed at the uptime I could maintain.
Generally, my efficiency increased as I did not have to worry about memory fragmenting, which often resulted in misbehaving applications bringing down the entire OS. Instead, OS X would usually allow the application to die gracefully, leaving the operating system untouched.
All was not the same between this new incarnation of the Mac OS and its predecessors. The terminal brought new found flexibility and power that the old design didn't offer. While typing in esoteric commands seemed anathema to the Mac's traditional GUI approach to interaction, I found this tool encouraging. Indeed, an increased comfort with the terminal led to my developing fondness for *nix systems in general. Consequently, I found myself becoming acquainted with OS X's free relatives - the BSDs and Linux.
If not for Apple's ability to comfortably merge (more or less anyway) the power of Unix with the friendliness of the Mac OS, I would never have discovered this other world of computing. Sure, I had heard of the various Unix cousins, but I had never felt compelled to dig into anything command line related. Hadn't I left DOS behind because I did not want to muck around with such an anachronistic way of interacting with a personal computer.
I suppose everything old will be new again. Sometimes the CLI is the better tool, and sometimes the GUI is preferred. Good thing Mac OS X was able to do such a good job with both interfaces.
What started out as a little dabbling has led me to embrace these other operating systems on both PowerPC and x86 hardware. While 90% of my computers are Mac OS systems, many still running pre-OS X versions of the Mac OS, I have fully embraced the new world.
This is somewhat to Apple's detriment, as I have hopped off the upgrade treadmill. Instead, I am more likely to transition to a Linux distribution in order to keep my Macs up to date. However, to pass the casual user/family member test, Mac OS X has proven to be a more than competent merger of robust underpinnings and friendly interface, which is why my mother's system will continue to run OS X.
I think we should all congratulate Apple for pushing forward with a whole new operating system. After all, they had been talking about doing so since the late 1980s.
The classic Mac OS is still great, but OS X is the future of the platform, and I am not hesitant to give credit where credit is due.
After OS X 10.5 "Leopard" is released (it should be sometime this year), 10.3 and 10.4 will become the new basis for low-end Mac computing. I'm sure I'll soon embrace all the wonderful new tools introduced in the years since I started using Mac OS X.
Happy fifth anniversary, OS X, and here's to many more.
Recent Embracing Obsolescence articles
- Steve Jobs stirs up the DRM hornet's nest, 02.12. Stripping DRM would level the playing field for players and allow digital music services to compete on price, quality, and selection.
- SoundApp an audio workhorse for PowerPC, 680x0 Macs, 12.22. For those using the classic Mac OS, SoundApp can convert tracks, play music, and look up CD tracks online.
- The iAudio G3: More features than an iPod nano at an iPod shuffle price, 12.14. The iAudio G3 lets you avoid DRM lock-in while providing multiformat support, more features than an iPod nano, and a price lower than Apple's iPod shuffle.
- Does Zune improve the DRM landscape or just increase confusion?, 12.08. Microsoft has forsaken backward compatibility with its own PlaysForSure standard to take on the iPod. Won't that just further confuse potential customers?
- More in the Embracing Obsolescence index.
Links for the Day
- Mac of the Day: 17" iMac G4/800 MHz, July 2002 - The iMac 'grows up' with a 17" 1440 x 900 display.
- Group of the Day: LisaList supports Lisa users.
- November 8 in LEM history: 99: OS 9: I think I like it - 01: The simplified Mac life - Soured on Windows - Flea market Mac - 02: Little room for improvement in new 'Books - Combo drive upgrade for iceBooks - 04: Re-Porter - 05: Fix the old iMac or buy a Mac mini? - Apple's Copland project - 06: MacBook Core 2 - MacBook value equation - Cheap is as cheap does - 07: Problems with Classic mode in Tiger - The G4 Power Mac that won't run Leopard
- Support Low End Mac
Recent Content on Low End Mac
- Quad-Core CPU Makes Sense in MacBook Pro, OS X 10.6 Causing Overheating, Overseas Power, and More, The 'Book Review, 11.06. Also Late 2009 MacBook reviewed, how to add RAM to new MacBook, 18.4in Acer notebook used Intel i7, and SanDisk SSD chosen for Sony VAIO X.
- Dumping Macs for Google Apps, SSD in iMac, Late 2009 iMac Performance Problems, and More, Mac News Review, 11.06. /newsrev/09mnr/1106.html
- WiFi Paranoia, iMac-O-Lantern, Magic Mouse Does Click, Free Clipboard Managers, and More, Charles W. Moore, Miscellaneous Ramblings, 11.05. Also strange time stamps, problem with ColorIt on Intel Mac, and the story behind OS X 10.5.4 install discs.
- IDE Is Dead; Long Live SATA!, Dan Knight, Mac Musings, 11.04. SATA has displaced parallel ATA. While IDE hard drives haven't disappeared, the best deals are in SATA hard drives.
- QuickTime X in Snow Leopard Imports, Trims, and Publishes Video Quickly and Easily, Alan Zisman, Zis Mac, 11.04. The long, slow process of importing video into iMovie to edit it, then render it to another format, is history as QuickTime X does that much more quickly.
- More links in our archive.
Recent Deals
- Best Mac Pro Deals, 11.03. Used 2.66 GHz 4-core, $1,300; 3.0 8-core. $2,299; refurb 2.66 4-core Nehalem, $2,149; 2.93, $2,549; 2.26 8-core, $2,799; 2.93, $4,999.
- Best iPhone Deals, 11.03. New 8 GB iPhone 3G, $$99; refurb 16 GB 3GS, $149; new, $199; 32 GB, $299.
- Best 12" PowerBook G4 Deals, 11.03. Used 867 MHz SperDrive, $348; 1 GHz, $499; 1.33 Combo, $298; SD, $559; 1.5 Combo, $448; SuperDrive, $589.
- Best Power Mac G3 and PCI Video Card Deals, 11.02. Used beige 300 MHz, $25; G4/366, $49; blue & white 350, $80; 400, $90; 450, $105; PCI video cards from $15; shipping additional.
- Best Power Mac G4 and AGP Video Card Deals, 11.02. Used 400 MHz, $50; 733 MHz, $69; 933 MHz, $209; 1.25 GHz dual, $299.
- Best 15" MacBook Pro Deals, 11.02. Used 2.0 GHz, $800; 2.2, $900; 2.4, $1,000; refurb 2.53, $1,449; 2.66, $1,699; 2.8, $1,949; 3.06, $2,169; new 2.53, $1,579; 2.66, $1,799; more.
- Best Mac mini Deals, 10.30. Used 1.33 GHz G4 mini, $379; 1.42, $389; 1.5, $419; 1.83 GHz Core Duo, $350; Core 2, $439; new 2.26 GHz nVidia, $580; 2.53 GHz, $770; Server, $990.
- Best G4 iBook Deals, 10.30. Used 12" 1.07 GHz Combo, $225; 1.33 GHz, $298; 14" 1 GHz, $349; 1.33 GHz, $398; 1.42 GHz SuperDrive, $498.
- Best Classic Mac OS Deals, 10.30. System 6.0.8 floppies, $10; 7.1, $12; 7.5, $20; 7.5 CD, $4; 7.6 $13; 8.1, $11; 8.5, $20; 8.6, $90; 9.0, $20; 9.2.2, $30.
- More deals in our archive.
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